Snap is essentially a Free Software digital image organizer and viewer. It is not a photo editing application, like Adobe® Photoshop® or the GIMP. It lets you embed captions and keywords directly in your pictures by using EXIF or IPTC metadata tags. You can then browse through your pictures by dates or keywords, create slideshows, export files optimized for sharing by e-mail, and more.

You say Snap is Free Software. What does that mean?

Snap is licensed under the GNU General Public License, or GPL. The GPL is a Free Software license, as defined by the Free Software Foundation. Basically, a Free Software license guarantees you as the user certain important freedoms, including

The freedom to run the program, for any purpose (freedom 0).

The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor (freedom 2).

The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits (freedom 3). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Many other excellent programs are released under Free Software licenses, such as the Firefox® web browser, the GNU/Linux operating system, and the Gaim instant messanging application. You can find a lot of Free Software and other open source programs at SourceForge.

What do I need to run Snap?

Currently, Snap only runs on Microsoft Windows XP or Windows 2000, and requires version 2.0 of the .NET Framework. We're not sure about the hardware requirements, but you should be able to run it with 256 MB of RAM and a ~1GHz processor.

Why do all the toolbar icons look the same?

Right now, we don't have an artist on hand to help
us draw the icons (or other artwork). Please let us know if you know of any
good sources for icons or if you are an artist that would like to help us draw some.

How did Snap start?

Snap started as a school project in a Software Engineering class at UC Berkeley. We had fun working on it, so we decided to continue it as an open source project.

Is the graphical user interface done?

Nope. This is a very early version of Snap. Although we're pretty
happy with it so far, we think the interface can be even better. We have some ideas for
improvements, but we're happy to listen to other suggestions.

Is the back-end done?

Nope. Again, this is a very early version of Snap. Although we're
pretty happy with it so far, and although it's come a long way (you should have seen how
quickly it ate up memory in some pre-release versions), we want to make the back-end even
better and add a number of features.

There's a delay between editing captions or labels and updating the
thumbnail image. What's up with that?

The delay is a result of how Snap currently handles metadata writes to disk
and updates from disk. We hope to fix this in the future.